Author

Abstract

Evans D., Kula E. and Sezer H. (2005) Regional welfare weights for the UK: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, Regional Studies 39 , 923-937. In relation to public spending and regional policy, the importance of distributional issues is stressed, and regional welfare weights are derived from an appropriate underlying social welfare function. Estimates of these weights are then provided for the four countries comprising the UK. Welfare weights now have a very high policy profile following the special emphasis placed by the UK Treasury, in its recently revised guidance on appraisal and evaluation in government, on the assessment of the distributional impacts of social projects and policies. From an empirical perspective, the critical component of each welfare weight measure is the elasticity of marginal utility of income ( e ). Alternative estimation approaches based on demand analysis and income tax data are used to determine e , and a preferred measure of 1.60 emerges. The resulting regional welfare weights are then compared with recent patterns of per-capita regional public expenditure in the UK. The paper concludes by emphasizing the scope for further empirical work on welfare weights and regional policy in relation to both the UK and the European Union.

Statistics

Corrections

All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:regstd:v:39:y:2005:i:7:p:923-937. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.